1.
Intellectual property
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Intellectual property refers to creations of the intellect for which a monopoly is assigned to designated owners by law. Intellectual property rights are the protections granted to the creators of IP, and include trademarks, copyright, patents, industrial design rights, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. Artistic works including music and literature, as well as discoveries, inventions, words, phrases, symbols, the Statute of Monopolies and the British Statute of Anne are seen as the origins of patent law and copyright respectively, firmly establishing the concept of intellectual property. The first known use of the intellectual property dates to 1769. The first clear example of modern usage goes back as early as 1808, the German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property to the confederation. According to Lemley, it was only at point that the term really began to be used in the United States. The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I for monopoly privileges, the evolution of patents from royal prerogative to common-law doctrine. The term can be used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown. The statement that discoveries are. property goes back earlier, in Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846. Until recently, the purpose of property law was to give as little protection as possible in order to encourage innovation. Historically, therefore, they were granted only when they were necessary to encourage invention, limited in time, the concepts origins can potentially be traced back further. In 500 BCE, the government of the Greek state of Sybaris offered one years patent to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury. Intellectual property rights include patents, copyright, industrial design rights, trademarks, plant variety rights, trade dress, geographical indications, a copyright gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. Copyright may apply to a range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms. Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed, an industrial design right protects the visual design of objects that are not purely utilitarian. An industrial design consists of the creation of a shape, configuration or composition of pattern or color, or combination of pattern, an industrial design can be a two- or three-dimensional pattern used to produce a product, industrial commodity or handicraft. Plant breeders rights or plant variety rights are the rights to use a new variety of a plant. The variety must amongst others be novel and distinct and for registration the evaluation of propagating material of the variety is examined, a trademark is a recognizable sign, design or expression which distinguishes products or services of a particular trader from the similar products or services of other traders
2.
EBay
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EBay Inc. is a multinational e-commerce corporation, facilitating online consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. Today it is a business with operations in about 30 countries. The company manages eBay. com, an auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods. It previously offered online money transfers, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay from 2002 until 2015, the website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items and again when those items are sold. The AuctionWeb was founded in California on September 3,1995 by French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as part of a personal site. One of the first items sold on AuctionWeb was a laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained, Im a collector of broken laser pointers and this was revealed in Adam Cohens book, The Perfect Store, and confirmed by eBay. Reportedly, eBay was simply a hobby for Omidyar until his Internet service provider informed him he would need to upgrade to a business account due to the high volume of traffic to his website. The resulting price increase forced him to start charging those who used eBay and it resulted in the hiring of Chris Agarpao as eBays first employee to handle the number of checks coming in for fees. Jeffrey Skoll was hired as the first president of the company in early 1996, growth was phenomenal, in January 1997 the site hosted 2,000,000 auctions, compared with 250,000 during the whole of 1996. The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay in September 1997, originally, the site belonged to Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyars consulting firm. Omidyar had tried to register the domain name echobay. com, but found it already taken by the Echo Bay Mines, in 1997, the company received $6.7 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. Meg Whitman was hired as eBay President and CEO in March 1998, at the time, the company had 30 employees, half a million users and revenues of $4.7 million in the United States. EBay went public on September 21,1998, and both Omidyar and Skoll became instant billionaires, eBays target share price of $18 was all but ignored as the price went to $53.50 on the first day of trading. As the company expanded product categories beyond collectibles into almost any saleable item, in February 2002, the company purchased iBazar, a similar European auction web site founded in 1998, and then bought PayPal on October 3,2002. By early 2008, the company had expanded worldwide, counted hundreds of millions of registered users,15, after nearly ten years at eBay, Whitman decided to enter politics
3.
Facebook
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Facebook is an American for-profit corporation and an online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California. Facebook gradually added support for students at other universities. Since 2006, anyone age 13 and older has been allowed to become a user of Facebook, though variations exist in the minimum age requirement. The Facebook name comes from the face book directories often given to United States university students, Facebook may be accessed by a large range of desktops, laptops, tablet computers, and smartphones over the Internet and mobile networks. After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile indicating their name, occupation, schools attended and so on. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups organized by workplace, school, hobbies or other topics, in groups, editors can pin posts to top. Additionally, users can complain about or block unpleasant people, because of the large volume of data that users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for its privacy policies. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements which appear onscreen, Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering in February 2012, and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13,2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poors 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion, Facebook has more than 1.86 billion monthly active users as of December 31,2016. As of April 2016, Facebook was the most popular social networking site in the world, Facebook classifies users from the ages of 13 to 18 as minors and therefore sets their profiles to share content with friends only. Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash on October 28,2003 while attending Harvard University as a sophomore, to accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of Harvards computer network and copied private dormitory ID images. Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online, the site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final exam. He uploaded 500 Augustan images to a website, each of which was featured with a corresponding comments section and he shared the site with his classmates, and people started sharing notes. The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004 and he said that he was inspired by an editorial about the Facemash incident in The Harvard Crimson. On February 4,2004, Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook, originally located at thefacebook. com. com and they claimed that he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. The three complained to The Harvard Crimson and the newspaper began an investigation and they later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling in 2008 for 1.2 million shares. Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, within the first month, eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website
4.
Google
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Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, Google was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph. D. students at Stanford University, in California. Together, they own about 14 percent of its shares, and they incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4,1998. An initial public offering took place on August 19,2004, in August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate called Alphabet Inc. Google, Alphabets leading subsidiary, will continue to be the company for Alphabets Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructure, Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google, replacing Larry Page, rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond Googles core search engine. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome OS, the new hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, stated, a lot of the innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience. Google has also experimented with becoming an Internet carrier, alexa, a company that monitors commercial web traffic, lists Google. com as the most visited website in the world. Several other Google services also figure in the top 100 most visited websites, including YouTube, Googles mission statement, from the outset, was to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful, and its unofficial slogan was Dont be evil. In October 2015, the motto was replaced in the Alphabet corporate code of conduct by the phrase Do the right thing, Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. They called this new technology PageRank, it determined a websites relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine BackRub, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Originally, Google ran under Stanford Universitys website, with the domains google. stanford. edu, the domain name for Google was registered on September 15,1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4,1998. It was based in the garage of a friend in Menlo Park, craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee. The first funding for Google was an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was incorporated. At least three other investors invested in 1998, Amazon. com founder Jeff Bezos, Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton. Author Ken Auletta claims that each invested $250,000, early in 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million, vinod Khosla, one of Excites venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it. Googles initial public offering took place five years later, on August 19,2004, at that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024
5.
Microsoft
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Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup, as of 2016, it was the worlds largest software maker by revenue, and one of the worlds most valuable companies. Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4,1975, to develop and it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The companys 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion, in June 2012, Microsoft entered the personal computer production market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface, a line of tablet computers. The word Microsoft is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which offered a computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in science at Washington State University. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systemss Altair 8800 microcomputer, Allen suggested that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device, after a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didnt actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter and they officially established Microsoft on April 4,1975, with Gates as the CEO. Allen came up with the name of Micro-Soft, as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, the company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. Microsoft entered the OS business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, however, it was MS-DOS that solidified the companys dominance. For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, branding it as MS-DOS, following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS. Since IBM copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, other companies had to engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOSs available software selection, the company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as with a publishing division named Microsoft Press. Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkins disease, while jointly developing a new OS with IBM in 1984, OS/2, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, a graphical extension for MS-DOS, on November 20,1985. Once Microsoft informed IBM of NT, the OS/2 partnership deteriorated, in 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office
6.
Canonical (company)
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Canonical employs staff in more than 30 countries and maintains offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo and the Isle of Man. Canonical Ltd. has created and continues to back several projects, principally these are free and open-source software or tools designed to improve collaboration between free software developers and contributors. Some projects require a Contributor License Agreement to be signed. K, Canonical also claimed it would wait for the business to turn into a profitable one within another three to five years. Shuttleworth regarded Canonical as positioning itself as demand for services related to free software rose and this strategy has been compared to Red Hats business strategies in the 1990s. In an early 2009 New York Times article, Shuttleworth said that Canonicals revenue was creeping towards $30 million, however, as of 2013 the company was again in investment mode, making a $21.3 million loss as it invested in mobile. At the same time, the word Ubuntu was trademarked in connection with clothing, Canonical Group Ltd is located in London. Canonical USA Inc. is located in Lexington, Massachusetts, Canonical China Ltd is located in Shanghai. Canonical Brasil Ltda is located in São Paulo, Canonical Canada Ltd is located in Montreal. Canonical Ltd Taiwan Br. is located in Taipei, Canonical has more than 500 employees. The head office is in London, previously on the 27th floor of Millbank Tower, in the summer of 2006, Canonical opened an office in Montreal to house its global support and services operation. Taipei 101 is also home to a Canonical office, there is also an OEM team in Lexington, Massachusetts, United States. Bernard, was responsible for all major marketing deployments Stuart Langridge Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community leader Official website
